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Skill Balance Patch Released with Explanatory Notes - Guild Wars 2 - MMORPG.com
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Skill Balance Patch Released with Explanatory Notes - Guild Wars 2 - MMORPG.com
Guild Wars 2 News - The Guild Wars 2 site has been updated with the latest patch notes that will bring a huge number of changes to the game in terms of balance. Every single class has had a pass made over skills in the interest of balance. Not wanting to leave players in the dark as to why changes were made, explanatory notes have been provided as a header to each class's section.
Comments
Too bad they didn't consider this back when they launched, this class wouldn't have been plagued with being denied events or dungeons if it had been balanced from the start. And oh look it only took them 5 years to take explosives seriously.
Joined 2004 - I can't believe I've been a MMORPG.com member for 20 years! Get off my lawn!
Havent looked much at the other professions yet but its all good for engineers.
Trinity was never completely removed, but there was a very soft trinity. In raiding, there is definitely a trinity. The biggest mistake GW2 could have made would have been to play the same as every other AAA mmorpg. The success that GW2 has found is mainly due to the fact that it isn't a WoW clone and plays differently than many other mmorpgs.
Still nothing notable for Turrets. Lots of buffs to a lot of areas I didn't realize needed buffing such as whirling wraths damage increase. It was already fairly comparable to 100 blades and much easier to hit with.. now with 20% more damage? And a reduced recharge?
I'll be interested in testing these changes. What usually happens is I try them, find I dislike something and then quit for several months.
I applaud them for not using the Trinity. Anyone remember the riots in GW1 at THK when monks would not play, because they got blamed for other players over extending and not being healing when they were not close? This is part of the reason A.Net did away with the Trinity.
There is no 'Soft Trinity' - there either is one or not. Stop spinning nonsense.
And yet that's one of my favorite things about it.
Druid, Rev Ventari, Guardian and Eles all have very distinct healing roles. They've added specific taunt abilities for aggro gain which they never had in a true capacity when GW2 released.
Some classes like Warrior can be built very strongly on the aggro and control dimensions of a tanking class.
Control/Support can be handled by almost all classes and most expect that every class should have strong crowd control skills, but some classes are just better at crowd control than others.
Luckily most classes have a spec that can work for crowd control, but some just have many more options like the Engineer that can do both single target or AOE crowd control very well.
Saying there isn't a "soft trinity" is basically saying.. "I can't be a healer, I can't be a tank, I can't be crowd control support" and that's wrong. You can spec to do all of those things, and while it's not the most sought after team comp in PvE - "bunker" and healer builds are still popular in PvP and can be quite useful.
You can tell they are just doing simple fixes and putting big stuff on hold for the next expansion.
I may come back again when the next expansion is out and on sale, they just don't make enough changes to get gw2 where it needs to be for long term investment and play.
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
What maskedweasel said is true, the game has a trinity now. Although, it's functions and benefits are strictly confined within raid. With raid, elitism in the community just become more apparent than ever. Fyi, a limited function of dps meter has been recently given the green light.
Anet has been resorting to time gating more as of late.
When it comes to GW2, Anet has never excelled at balancing. They are notorious for leaving certain classes/professions in the ditch for years. Whether they are skills, utilities, weapons or craftings; everything are out of whack.
So when you see them pushing out "balance patch", expect it to be a disaster rather than not. In other words, don't keep your hopes up.
The game is still immersive though. It is still fun to play to a certain extend. It has been in decline for years now, contents wise and direction of the game in general. HoT expansion just piled on that misery.
Gw2's balance team's biggest achievement is that they've convinced Anet to employ and keep paying them money to do what ever it is that they do.
Unless they have some major change for classes on the works that they can't yet announce,or there's not really a dedicated class balance team,if after all these months all they came up with is this half ass excuse of a patch,then good job to them and to the sucker that's paying them.
Agreed. Built properly, there's a few ranger specs that are all but completely unkillable in sPvP and WvW. Celestial Avatar is very strong in it's own right, not to mention being able to spec into removing ALL conditions for simply just going into the form and then being able to stealth leaving the form. Probably some of the best engage and disengage in the game.
Pets need a fix in a big way. Far too many of them are completely useless, and the ones that are strong are only strong in pretty specific instances outside of PvE. Large scale WvW or sPvP with a ton of aoe going on means that your pet stays at your side and only attacks when you can reasonably expect it to live long enough to make a difference. Small scale pvp, pets do ok, well a couple do well and the rest are horrible.
Even with these balance changes, there are still far too many skills that are left completely in the dust. Turrets for engineers are pretty terrible. Same for spirit weapons for Guardians. It'll be interesting to see if warrior banners see use again, but they've been almost completely unused for quite a while. Pretty much every profession has skills and even weapons that completely under perform and see next to no use outside of very niche builds.
My biggest complaint though is that ANet has moved extremely slowly with these balance patches. The changes they make are questionable at times, and many things have been left basically broken. They really need to have a heavy focus into fixing professions across the board. I fear the task might be a bit too large for the team they have though.
And yet every game that tries to get rid of it devolves into the flavor of the month after launch with a rapid decline thereafter.
GW2's strengths were in its breaking the myriad of MMO systems which forced people to run away from one another. Shared kills, individual loot, shared quest progress, individual resource nodes, automatic downscaling. All of these help bring players who happened to be out and about in the same area together in ad hoc groups that needed no formal mechanics to perform any of those actions.
GW2's one glaring problem was the removal of the trinity. It is flawed and it failed, utterly. They stated it was to increase build diversity yet anything outside of solo content devolved into a DPS race. Anything outside of 'zerker was suboptimal to a laughable degree. They removed the Tank and Healer and made everyone DPS. That is not an improvement.
Let's just compare 2 modern titles. GW2 and ESO. Both have regular content drops. Both have many of the same secondary systems in common. The major difference, systems wise, is that ESO has the trinity while GW2 does not.
Both are sitting around 7Mil active players at some point in 2016 (based on quick Google searches for any quasi-reliable metrics).
Saying that noone wants the trinity, that it is outmoded, is patently false. That might apply to you, but certainly not a large enough segment of the MMO player base to say that it is no longer a viable design path.
I quit GW2 after years of playing (shortly after HoT, in fact) because I got sick of the abysmal combat. There's no MMO that I reference more on the things it does right outside of combat. I love the look, the secondary systems, the social aspects, everything. Except the god-awful combat. Every time I pop in to try it again I remember why I love it so, and why I have to leave it be.
Not just another pretty color.
Plus, if you happen to love Ranger greatsword (which I do), then you just received a massive buff. Hell, aside from that, you received nothing but minor buffs and much needed QoL fixes in this patch.
If anything, you deserve significant nerfs, and I'm saying this as a Ranger main.